This tourist playground has a dizzying array of resorts, cottages, motels and inns — everything but chains.

If you think its expensive to stay in Wisconsin's Door County, you havent looked very hard.

In early June, rates can be almost ludicrously low, cheaper than a Super 8. And even on weekends in July and August, its not hard to find a decent place for $100 or less if you book in advance.

The Door Peninsula's breezy beaches are the place to be when the rest of the region is sweltering. During one early June heat wave, temperatures there were 20 to 40 degrees lower, and lodging rates were low, too  I got three nights for the price of two.

The state that pioneered rail trails isn't resting on its laurels.

When people think of bicycling in Wisconsin, the famous Elroy-Sparta State Trail often is first to pop into their minds. But the state has added many, many trails since the Elroy-Sparta debuted in 1967, and it's time to try them.

All of the trails listed below use finely crushed limestone, except as noted. They're suitable for touring bikes, though a wider tire is better. Chip-sealed trails are like asphalt but softer, and can be nearly as smooth because they don't become pitted.

State trail passes are $5 daily, $25 annual; passes also are good in winter on ski trails. Rates on county and city trails vary; many are free, including the Interurban and Oak Leaf.

No money, no problem: Here are 20 great vacations that are easy on the wallet.

In summer, its not as hard as youd think to take a trip that's a lot of fun but doesn't cost much.

Many of the great travel experiences in Wisconsin cant be bought, anyway  bicycling along Lake Michigan, camping on sandbars, volunteering in a lighthouse.

If you like music and festivals, you're really in luck  Wisconsin has many fun, family-friendly fests with on-site camping, at unbeatable prices. And its national forests and county parks are full of great campsites.

For guests, the comforts of this northwoods Wisconsin town belie its reputation.

From the beginning, Hayward has been a rough town.

It sprang up in Wisconsin's north woods along with the logging camps, and its saloons and brothels gave it a reputation that was reflected in a rail conductor's call: "All aboard for Hayward, Hurley and Hell!"

In Bayfield, a fall festival has grown to jumbo proportions.

In Bayfield, Wis., the apple has mushroomed.

In 1961, the apple was the object of a small village festival. Today, it draws 60,000 people to a fall blowout featuring all things apple  fritters, sundaes, dumplings, pies and apple-cheeked children.

On northern Wisconsin's Bayfield Peninsula, Apple Festival is nearly as revered as motherhood.

In this sporty town on the Wisconsin River, just go with the flow.

In Wausau, water is power.

Sawmills were first to use the thundering rapids along the Wisconsin River, which have been working hard ever since.

But these rapids generate more than the electricity that lights a bulb  they also draw world-class athletes for thrilling tournaments, such the 2012 world whitewater kayak/canoe championships for juniors and under-23 paddlers, some of them Olympics-bound.

On this Wisconsin peninsula, vacation isn't complete without a dose of culture.

Once, evening entertainment in Door County consisted of watching the sun set over Green Bay.

Then, at the turn of the century, the seven sons of the Eagle Bluff lighthouse keepers formed a band to entertain at various gatherings, arriving with a horse-drawn piano.

The arts scene really got going in 1935, when the first theater was founded on the lawn of a Fish Creek motel. The same year, a Danish landscape architect from Chicago started the first arts school. In 1953, the first music festival was founded.

In a Wisconsin college town, antiques shops and an ornate theater stand fast amid pizza shops.

In the western Wisconsin college town of Menomonie, shops and restaurants come and go.

One building will stay for the ages: the Mabel Tainter Memorial Theater, built of sandstone blocks backed by brick.

Lumber baron Andrew Tainter built it in memory of his daughter Mabel, who died at age 19 of a burst appendix. With two renovations, the town has polished its gloriously golden interior, fit for a Moorish princess.

The Wisconsin river town of Hudson has a treat for every visitor.

From the beginning, the St. Croix River has shaped Hudson's identity.

The first settlers came by canoe on the fur-trade highway. The first steamboat docked in 1847, and soon logs were floating down the St. Croix to sawmills in Hudson and its neighbor on the Minnesota side, Stillwater.

Hudson's 1913 toll bridge became a landmark on the St. Croix, fattening town coffers after the lumber boom ended. The bridge closed in 1951, but its raised bed still stretches partway over the river, giving residents and visitors a place to stroll on warm summer evenings.

Leinenkugel's brewery, the Old Abe bike trail and the Chippewa River draw tourists to this Wisconsin town.

In Chippewa Falls, people owe a debt to two kinds of folks: the bubbas and the geeks.

The first came to harvest the lumber and stayed to drink the beer, or so claims the brewery: "It takes a special beer to attract 2,500 men to a town with no women,'' says Jacob Leinenkugel Brewing, founded in 1867 and now the oldest business in town.

Then came the guys with slide rules. Seymour Cray, the son of the city engineer, spent his childhood in Chippewa Falls tinkering with radios, then went off to war and college.

In the forest of northwest Wisconsin, navigate a singular system of singletrack.

In the forest around Hayward and Cable, its easy to catch speed fever.

This is where the worlds best Nordic skiers compete on the Birkie Trail, famous for its relentless ups and downs, and mountain bikers race on the CAMBA trails, known for 270-degree switchbacks and such obstacles as a boulder called the Volkswagen.

In this pocket of northwest Wisconsin, endurance athletes streak through Chequamegon National Forest year-round, training for the next big race on more than 300 miles of marked trails.

In Wisconsin's north woods, vacationers flock to this Island City.

In northeast Wisconsin, Minocqua is all things to all tourists.

It's been a boating destination for more than a century because it's on a chain of lakes and nearly surrounded by Lake Minocqua. In fact, it's Nature's Original Water Park, and the town has the trademark to prove it.

In Wisconsin's north woods, Lac du Flambeau offers a portal into Ojibwe culture.

In a quiet corner of Wisconsin lake country, Ojibwe culture lives and breathes.

The French called this place Lac du Flambeau, lake of the torches.'' To the Ojibwe it was Wa-Swa-Goning, the place where they spear fish by torchlight.

Violent protests shattered its north-woods serenity in the 1980s, when the courts upheld spear-fishing treaty rights. The backlash traumatized the community, but also strengthened its commitment to tradition.

On the Lake Michigan side of the famous peninsula, this town draws nature-lovers.

Every May, wildflower followers find their way to Baileys Harbor.

They walk past two 1870 range lights on a boardwalk lined by endangered dwarf lake iris. On strips of wetland called swales, they look for bogbean and goldthread. In June, they search for 25 species of orchids.

The land Ridges Sanctuary occupies almost became a trailer park. Now, it's habitat for more species of plants than any other place in Wisconsin.

From Sister Bay, a tall ship and a double decker take tourists for a ride.

There's a lot of water in Wisconsin, but only one place that's surrounded by it: the northern Door Peninsula.

It's really an island, since the Sturgeon Bay Ship Canal connects Lake Michigan to the slightly more tranquil waters of Green Bay. From there, the peninsula is lined by beaches, limestone cliffs, lighthouses and picturesque villages.

In this historic resort town, crowds come for the shops and the scenery.

Few tourist towns are more blessed than Fish Creek.

It's known as Door County's shopping town, and if people think that's too much of a good thing  well, they're in the minority, judging by throngs on the streets.

It's also the gateway to the wildly popular Peninsula State Park. This big park is more like a resort, with a beach, boat rentals, playgrounds, tennis court and golf course, plus a theater, lighthouse, bike trails and one of the state's best-known hiking trails.

Once, these lighthouse keepers, lumberjacks and lieutenants lived only in the history books. Now, they're painted onto Ashland's walls, where they serve as backdrop to shoppers, college students and tourists going about their business downtown.

The first mural, painted for Wisconsin's sesquicentennial in 1998 by local artists Kelly Meredith and Susan Prentice Martinsen, featured the snowshoe-clad figure of pioneer Asaph Whittlesey as well as editor Sam Fifield, Ojibwe Chief Buffalo and other characters from the town's early days.

From cozy north-woods lodges, guests glide into a world of white.

In a blizzard, nothing is better than holing up with an expert cook, a bottomless cookie jar, a steam room, a big hot tub and one of the best ski-trail groomers in the Midwest.

One January, the stars aligned in the heavens and I found myself in the best possible place to be during a blizzard: Maplelag.

This ski resort in northwest Minnesota is renowned for many things  all-you-can-eat meals, personable owners, hundreds of stained-glass windows and signs from defunct train depots  but its most famous for its ability to conjure a bit of snow into world-class ski tracks when the rest of Minnesota is bare.

Around this snowy Wisconsin town, there's a trail for everyone.

To the uninitiated, the vast expanses of forest around Eagle River, Wis., look like a lot of nothing.

It's rocky, useless land, forfeited to the government during the Depression, and hardly anyone lives there  Eagle River, pop. 1,400, is Vilas County's only city.

This empty forest, however, draws thousands, and on winter weekends, it's not so empty. Snowmobilers, skiers and snowshoers come to these woods  to the east and north lie the 657,000 square acres of Nicolet National Forest, and to the west, the 220,00 acres of Northern Highland-American Legion State Forest.

A northwest Wisconsin resort town keeps a frontier art alive.

One hundred years ago, the white-pine forests around Hayward were the domain of a special breed of man.

They were swampers, sawyers and skidders. They were deckers, chainers, undercutters and riverhogs. They were dwarfed by the colossal trees they had to wrestle out of the forest, and their lives hung on their own brawn, nerve and dumb luck.

Six days a week they worked, dawn to dusk, all winter long. In spring, they'd roar into Hayward for whiskey and wild women; their brawling earned the town a reputation reflected in a train conductor's call: "All aboard for Hayward, Hurley and Hell!''

National forests, state parks and wildlife preserves roll out the white carpet for winter hikers.

On the week before Christmas, I figured Id found the prettiest place in the world.

Fresh snow had fallen around Hayward, and the forest was sparkling. We made our way down the intimate lanes of the Makwa Trail on snowshoes, brushing past heavily laden balsam boughs as we scaled gentle ridges and descended into snowy glades.

Each new tableau was more beautiful than the last, and I congratulated myself on the discovery that single-track mountain-biking trails are great for snowshoeing.

In the north woods, golden oldies recall a vanished era.

In the north woods, only the passage of time creates a classic.

There's nothing like the feel of a vintage lodge. Whatever it comes from  the burnished logs hewed by ax, the hearths made of stones picked from local fields, the faint fragrance of aged pine and cedar  it can't be ordered from the local furniture store.

Jim Kerkow and Craig Mason know, because they own a furnishings business and they love old lodges. They were building a cabin near Hayward, Wis., and staying at nearby Spider Lake Lodge when its owner pointed out the obvious.

In north-central Wisconsin, a slow-moving monolith left a playground for weekend wanderers.

When the last glacier melted out of Wisconsin, it left a gift to future generations.

It wasn't much at first  boulders, heaps of gravel, water, chunks of ice trapped under rubble.

But over time, the ice seeped away and created kettle lakes for fishermen. The raging meltwater stripped away softer rock, leaving walls of volcanic rock for climbers and scenic river gorges for canoeists.

Here's where to look for the perfect place on a lake.

In summer, there's no better vacation than a week at the lake. Lazy afternoons on the beach, boat rides, marshmallow roasts, catching a string of sunnies  these are memories families savor for decades.

But if you don't have a family cabin, where do you go?

Wisconsin has more than 15,000 lakes, about the same number as Minnesota, plus shoreline on two Great Lakes.

The wild 21-island archipelago around Wisconsin's Bayfield Peninsula is the preserve of paddlers.

The sky was clear, the wind was still and Lake Superior was as placid as a lily pond.

It was a miracle that wouldn't last.

That's why it was torture for the dozen of us to sit through a long kayak safety course on the sandy beach of Bayfield, Wis., forming a ''human knot'' to foster cooperation in case of disaster and listening to trip leader Hovas Schall's horror stories about the big, mercurial lake.

In April, the kooky courtship of prairie chickens brings out the bird watchers.

It's a cold dawn on a Wisconsin marsh, but to a bunch of prairie chickens, it's a hot Saturday night on the town.

They've come to see and be seen, and hormones are in charge. It's serious business, perpetuating a dwindling species.

But to humans watching from a blind, it's high comedy. Whenever a girl chicken is nearby, the boys inflate neon-orange sacs under their throats, drum their feet and start scurrying around like, well, chickens with their heads cut off.

Wild rivers and cascades reward those who explore the remote forests around Marinette.

In a remote corner of Wisconsin, a trove of waterfalls lies buried in forests barely trod since the lumberjacks moved on to Minnesota.

Theyre not Wisconsins largest waterfalls, or the easiest to find; those can be found on the lower lip of Lake Superior, in Pattison, Amnicon and Copper Falls state parks (see Waterfalls of northern Wisconsin).

But there are lots of them in this undomesticated forest, so thick with headwaters its known as the cradle of rivers.

On Lake Michigan, a pioneering inventor transformed an island.

In Wisconsin, the American dream came true for a penniless boy from Iceland  and the rest of us made out pretty well, too.

In 1873, 5-year-old Hjörtur Thordarson traveled with his family from Iceland to Milwaukee, where his father soon died of typhoid fever.

The youngster's schooling stopped in second grade as the family moved to farms in Wisconsin and North Dakota, then resumed when the boy  called Chester  joined his married sister in Chicago and, at age 18, entered the fourth grade.

In northwest Wisconsin, this lively river is cherished by presidents, paddlers, fishermen and wildlife-watchers.

More than any other river in Wisconsin, the Bois Brule has a pedigree.

They call it River of Presidents, but it also attracts senators and millionaires. Named for pines charred by lightning strikes  burnt wood in Ojibwe, then French  it rises from conifer bogs near Solon Springs and flows toward Lake Superior.

Its cold, spring-fed currents harbor trout, and well-heeled fishermen discovered the river long before loggers moved in.

On quiet lanes, motorists ramble into the heart of the countryside.

In Wisconsin, people build whole trips around the roads less traveled.

Their destination? Nowhere. And on one of the state's lovely Rustic Roads, nowhere usually is enough.

Across the state, brown-and-yellow signs point to lightly traveled roads that preserve remnants of the past  piebald llamas (Rustic Road 92, south of River Falls), an 1870 lighthouse (Rustic Road 38 in Door County), Amish farms (Rustic Road 56, south of Ontario).

If you've been pinching pennies, here are some fun ways to reward yourself.

Door County isn't known as a budget destination. But this popular peninsula in Lake Michigan is like everywhere else  you can spend a lot if you want, but you don't have to.

We've already told you how to find deals on places to stay in Door County. Why did we go looking? Because sometimes, we like to do the rich man-poor man routine  that is, pinch pennies in one place so you can treat yourself in another.

At Stout's Lodge in western Wisconsin, guests gain entree into a less hurried era.

At the turn of the last century, as Wisconsins pineries were vanishing into sawmills, the vast fortunes they produced fell to the heirs of the Knapp, Stout lumber company.

Operating in the Red Cedar River valley, it was for a time the largest in the world, and Menomonie was the company town. The heirs gave it schools, churches, an auditorium; James Stout, son of the president, endowed the institute that became the University of Wisconsin-Stout.

His brother Frank found a different use for his money. He plowed $1.5 million in 1915 money into a 26-acre island estate near the town of Rice Lake, on Red Cedar Lake.

In Wisconsin, big-name musicians find their way to a small-town park.

Just two miles from the start of the Bois Brule, another famous river flows in the opposite direction.

It's the St. Croix, flowing out of Upper St. Croix Lake and toward the Mississippi River. The two rivers are separated by a continental divide but became an important water highway for Indians, explorers and fur traders.

Today, their two-mile portage trail is part of the North Country National Scenic Trail and listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

In Wisconsin, the best walking trails are gifts from the glaciers.

If youve ever walked in Wisconsin, chances are youve walked on the edge of a glacier.

The ice is gone, but not the rubble it pushed across the landscape, or the rock its melting waters carved. As the last glacier retreated, it left a path that geologists can follow as easily as yellow lines on a highway.

That path now is the 1,100-mile Ice Age National Scenic Trail, with 620 miles marked, usually by yellow rectangles tacked to trees. Its easy to follow in the forest, but many of the most spectacular spots are right along highways.

On the Wolf River in northeast Wisconsin, novice kayakers learn the moves at Bear Paw resort.

Whitewater paddlers are, by definition, thrill-seekers.

That's why they seek out the northeast corner of Wisconsin, "the cradle of rivers.'' The big Wisconsin River starts there, as do the Wolf, Peshtigo and Menominee, three of the Upper Midwest's best-known whitewater rivers.

On the Wolf River, Bear Paw Outdoor Adventure Resort has been a whitewater hub since 1994, selling gear to expert wranglers and teaching novices how to handle the rapids that churn over knots of boulders dropped by the last glacier.

In the Wisconsin countryside, self-taught visionaries left caches of concrete art.

In Wisconsin, nonconformity is cast in concrete.

In the middle of the last century, a motley collection of ordinary folk  a dairy farmer, a car dealer, a tavern owner, a factory worker  took a sharp turn away from the ordinary.

Out of the blue, they began to fashion fairy-tale characters, castles, temples and historical figures out of concrete, adorning them with bits of glass, crockery, porcelain and seashells and toiling until their yards overflowed with figures.